I built my own PC from parts off newegg back in August. The PC has worked fine but I'm having trouble with my external hard drive. I used the external drive (Western Digital 250GB usb/firewire lighted combo) from August to January with no problems at all. A few days ago I was prompted with a windows update and updated. Oddly, the updates were tryin' to install on my external drive. They failed to update because my OS is on my Internal partition and not my external. After that, the external drive still worked, even after I actually did the update correctly. (I'm still confused on why they originally went to my K: drive anyway) After I restarted my computer, however, the drive said it had 0 bytes used, 0 bytes available. Also, it came up as Local Disk rather than WDCombo in My Computer. It said I needed to reformat. I obviously got upset and tried to run a data recovery program to retrieve the information that I lost. The recovery program was 1% done after 2 hours, so I decided to stop it. (which in hindsight probably wasn't a good idea) After this, I restarted my computer and when it came back on, the device didn't work at all. It's not recognized by windows, it doesn't come up as a storage drive at all, the only thing I'm getting is a popup that says USB Device Not Recognized. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get my information back, but at this stage in the game I'd like to just get the ability to use my hard drive.

wow, that is weird, open up the firewire drive and assuming a pata type hd, connect up to your secondary ide chain ( again assuming pata) I like to diconnect all othe devices on the scondary ide and just connect the drive in question to take a look.

I have started to archive data to dvd's or burn clones of the hds with ghost 2003 to protect from unfortunate situations.